Global citizenship is a crucial concept in education that is essential to preparing students for navigating our interconnected world.
It is an active learning process that helps young people to understand the interconnectedness of local and global issues, aiming to equip individuals with the skills, attitudes and values needed to address challenges near and far.
Here are five key concepts of global citizenship:
Global citizenship in schools
1. Integration into education
Global citizenship is a cross-cutting theme in educational curricula. It acknowledges the challenges of balancing subject-based organisation and qualification pressures, but offers the potential to develop knowledge, understanding, skills and values associated with global citizenship across various subjects. This approach motivates young people and contributes to their overall educational achievement.
2. The head, heart and hands of global citizenship
The goal is a world with equitable power and resource distribution. By integrating global citizenship into the curriculum, rather than having a separate subject, teachers use a holistic approach to encourage critical thinking, empathy and active engagement in addressing global and local challenges.
Educators structure their approach to global citizenship around three core aspects:
- Head: focusing on knowledge and understanding, which includes exploring themes such as social justice, identity, diversity, sustainable development and more. It also involves critically analysing the root causes of social and environmental issues.
- Heart: developing the values and attitudes necessary for learners to stand in solidarity with those facing injustice, encouraging creative thinking, and fostering a willingness to listen and learn from others.
- Hands: equipping learners with the skills to effect real change. This combines knowledge and values with practical skills, and positions students to make a difference in their own lives and those of others.
3. Empowerment
Education practitioners play a pivotal role in embedding global citizenship into their teaching practice. Five “development education centres” in Scotland, or DECs, work as a collective to offer professional learning opportunities, online resources and publications.
The resources help educators connect global citizenship to key educational agendas, such as Getting It Right for Every Child and the GTCS (General Teaching Council for Scotland) standards. Most importantly, they provide practical methodologies that tackle the education challenge of empowering young people to believe they can improve their wellbeing and create a fairer, more sustainable world.
Global citizenship education is crucial for preparing learners to address local and global issues. It empowers them to understand the root causes of problems, develop a sense of solidarity - and gain the skills needed to make a real impact. As teachers, it is our role to support students on this journey.
4. Promoting interconnectedness
Global citizenship encourages individuals to view local issues within the broader context of global challenges. It emphasises the importance of understanding the connections between one’s own life and the lives of people worldwide.
By understanding these connections, individuals gain a more comprehensive perspective of the challenges we face as a global community. Global citizenship, then, highlights that local actions can have global consequences, and encourages learners to engage in complex problem solving.
5. Making the most of Scotland’s global citizenship resources
In Scotland, global citizenship is spearheaded by the five DECs. They offer valuable resources, professional learning opportunities and support for teachers to incorporate global citizenship into their classrooms.
These resources include online CLPL (career-long professional learning) courses, global-citizenship publications such as Stride, online modules and curated databases on the Signposts for Global Citizenships platform. They offer tangible ways to integrate global citizenship into the classroom - addressing myriad issues including children’s rights, global connections, consumerism and much more besides.
Ndulamo Malumbela leads on communications for the West of Scotland Development Education Centre (usually shortened to WOSDEC)
